


If Only

by electricshoebox



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Angst, F/M, Semi-Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-21 22:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricshoebox/pseuds/electricshoebox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh the bitterness, the sweetness of dreams</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Only

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to Snow Patrol’s “What If This Storm Ends?" a lot last night, which is so perfect for them, and this just sort of happened. It’s… sort of stream-of-consciousness, dipping a toe into prose-poem territory.

He wonders, sometimes, what she dreams of.  

Not the uneasy nights when she lays curled away, hunching into her knees, twitching, grunting, turning so sharply the sheets wrench away from him -- those dreams he knows. He sees them too, the wretched, twisted faces whispering in an unknown dark, the nightmares that throb like the taint in their veins long after waking, cold but sweating. The dreams without dragons, but with the pulsing, rising, never-ending hunger for them, the mindless plunge deeper, deeper beneath the ground, too hot and hard to breathe. Those dreams he knows.

But some nights she lays still, draped on her side, hair unbound and falling across her face. She sighs, but never frowns, and he presses her hair back and wonders. Does she see the old trees? Does she wander in their gentle shadows, slipping in and out of the sun as he always pictures on the quiet nights when she tells him stories? Does she dream in memories -- her sister’s laughter when she pushes her into the river again, her parents calling their names across a field, or her fingers stained with ink as she perches at the Keeper’s side over old, old books?

She doesn’t tell him her dreams, and he doesn’t tell her his. At first, in his earliest days just out of the Keep’s prison, he dreamt only bitter things. His grandmother’s scowl. His brother’s blood. His father laughing behind doors he cannot open, locks he cannot break. But then she came to his bed, one night when it was raining, and every night since. She stood at his door with dripping hair and cold skin and wild eyes. The lightning flashed outside, igniting every raindrop on her body for one beautiful moment. How could he ever dream of anything else?

They crashed together, like they always do, for they know no other way. He kissed the rain from her face and felt her nails under his shirt, and in the morning his bed smelled of earth and sky, and how could he ever dream of anything else?

But he doesn’t tell her his dreams. He doesn’t tell her how she’s made them sweet, so painfully sweet, and when he wakes, long after the sun calls her and she is dressed and gone, he lays still and aches. He dreams of her in sunny days he’ll never see. He dreams of strolling at her side in a forest far from here, and nearer the sea. He dreams of her when time has drunk deep from the honey gold of her hair, and has traced the pattern of her days into the corners of her eyes and the bend of her cheeks and the clench of her fist. He dreams of kissing her wrinkled frown. He dreams of a cottage in the forest with a bow (the only thing left older than he is) in the corner by a fireplace with two worn chairs.

He hates and loves these dreams. And so some nights he lays against her, his fingers smoothing over her skin, and wonders. Does she ever dream of years they will not have, of lives they were never meant to live? Does she dream of lives they lost when they vowed ‘so let it be, so let it be’ and drank deep of a bitter, blackened, cursed cup? He keeps her close. And he knows in the morning she will turn away, stretching, flinching out of reach, tiptoeing out the door. And he will lay still, and ache.

 


End file.
